Truly radical policies: how the Greens are hammering Labour’s left

Until a few months ago, Labour thought that its passage to power was simple enough. Hold onto its core vote, scoop up angry left-wing voters disaffected with the Liberal Democrats, and watch Ukip and the electoral system do the rest. They were reckoning without the Greens.

In 2010, the Green Party of England and Wales and the Scottish Green Party amassed a combined 1 per cent of the vote. Today the Greens are averaging 5 per cent, and even reached an all-time high of 8 per cent in a YouGov poll last week. And their trajectory is only going up: their average support has doubled since April. They are rapidly gaining footsoldiers – the membership of the Green Party of England and Wales has risen by 90 per cent in 2014. For so long bereft of publicity, the Greens have astutely exploited their exclusion from the broadcasters’ proposals from TV debates.

The upshot is terrifying for Labour. A Green surge would shatter Labour’s fragile electoral coalition for good. No wonder David Cameron supports including the Greens in the TV debates.

Labour is alert to this threat. Last month it appointed Sadiq Khan to lead a Labour’s Green Party Strategy Unit. Khan seems to believe that the Greens can be flattened through flattery. This week, he praised Caroline Lucas “with whom I agree on a great many things” and Green supporters, who “share the same values and aims as the Labour Party: reducing inequality, saving the NHS, building more homes, a commitment to human rights and civil liberties and protecting our environment.” But he warned that “every vote for the Green Party only makes it one vote easier for the Conservatives to win.” Vote Green, Get Tory is the new Vote Ukip, Get Labour.

The great problem for Labour is that it cannot simultaneously launch an offensive on its left and right flanks. Before 2013, Ukip took only one Labour vote for every nine they took from the Conservatives: no wonder Labour seemed so unperturbed by their rise. Since January 2013, it has lost six voters to Ukip for every nine that the Conservatives have lost to the People’s Army. Labour can try – as it has, but to no avail – to win back Ukip defectors but reconciling this with reaching out to disaffected left-wingers flirting with the Greens looks like an impossible balancing act.

And the Greens want to make it harder still. At last night’s Leaders Live debate, when Natalie Bennett answered questions from young voters, the Green Party leader again positioned her party well to Labour’s left. She reiterated her support for a wealth tax, and said she was attracted by a top rate of income tax of above 50 per cent, which would be imposed on income earned over £100,000, rather than over £150,000 as Labour proposes. Bennett also reiterated her support for the abolition of all academies and free schools.

Throughout, the implication was clear. Where Khan called Labour “a truly radical party again”, Bennett was decrying them as vacillating supporters of timid and incremental change. Labour’s worst nightmare is that enough of the Lib Dem defectors it has been relying on agree.

The Greens remain a long way from being a true “Ukip of the left”. They are yet to develop much working-class appeal – 61 per cent of its supporters are ABC1. Unless that changes drastically, they will not match Ukip in the election. But that does not mean they could not have a critical impact on the next general election: even with just three per cent of the vote, Ukip cost the Tories at least five seats in 2010. So perilous is Labour’s route to Downing Street that even similar damage to them from the Greens next May could stop Ed Miliband becoming Prime Minister.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.